A CLA By Any Other Name

Hi Mark Webbink who was the general counsel of Red Hat and now a board member of the Software Freedom Law Center and a law professor has taken over primary responsibilities of Groklaw from Pamela Jones and has written a article on the subject of copyright license agreements (CLA). A good article that compares the approach of Canonical, FSF and Fedora. In short, Fedora is way better :-) http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20110524120303815 "By contrast, the historical method used in the Fedora Project sponsored by Red Hat has been to obtain a broad license from the developer but leave the copyright ownership with the developer. This can be seen in the now superseded Fedora Project Individual Contributor License Agreement. In another departure from both the FSF and Canonical approach, Red Hat obtained an express license in any patents the contributor held covering the contribution. [snipped] But one of the things the maintainers of the Fedora Project came to realize is that Fedora is primarily an aggregator of projects, not an originator of projects. As an aggregator, Fedora is more interested in assuring that packages included in the distribution have an acceptable FOSS license that governs them rather than worrying about an assignment or broad license apart from that package license. So Red Hat, having hired much smarter lawyers than the one responsible for the old CLA (I think his first name was Mark) and listening to the Fedora developers went back to the drawing board and came up with the Fedora Project Contributor Agreement or FPCA. The FPCA is a very different animal. It is not a copyright assignment agreement, and it is not a broad grant of license in copyright to the code" "This new Fedora approach would appear to be a vast improvement over any of the other approaches discussed above" Rahul